“Postmodern Hopelessness and Post-Easter Hope”
By Anthony Hogart
In late March of last year, I was enjoying the beauty of Manueline architecture in Lisbon, Portugal, while writing an article on postmodern loneliness and the search for authentic community. I began the piece with a reference to the disconsolate loneliness apparent in Kurt Vonnegut, the celebrated American author. For example, when he visited the University of Washington in 1995, the campus newspaper reported, “In Vonnegut’s work, social emotions–feelings of guilt, embarrassment, loneliness, uselessness–are paramount.” I returned to the States from Portugal on Palm Sunday, and shortly after Easter, news broke of Vonnegut’s lamentable passing away. In death, as in life, Vonnegut both mirrored and influenced the wider culture.In his personal beliefs, Vonnegut was a secular humanist, and he was steeled in this conviction, even with a touch of irreverent satire: “If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist” (A Man Without a Country, 2005). Vonnegut credited his parents with inculcating his tendency toward “freethinking.” In an interview that appeared in the pages of Stud Terkel’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, Vonnegut explained, “They [his parents] had no expectation of an afterlife. . . . When I was growing up, nobody ever said anything about Heaven, about an afterlife. They said that this life was enough.” He continued, “I always say, ‘So it goes’—that’s all. Whenever anybody has died—and this would be my sister, my brother, my father, my mother, and I was nearby for those events—that’s how I felt. That was that. I had nobody to appeal to, to get mad at. When somebody dies, it’s wholly unsurprising and so it goes.”
Vonnegut received the Humanist of the Year award in 1992, and he was also chosen as the Honorary President of the American Humanist Association. He exuded his satirical humor even in this lauded position: In his 2005 work A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut recalled, “I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, ‘Isaac is up in heaven now.’ It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That’s my favorite joke.”
Throughout his troubled life, Vonnegut had often meditated upon death as the final existential moment. The introduction to Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) simply states: “Things die. All things die.” In Vonnegut’s worldview, the inevitable prospect of death coalesced with a pessimistic view of life. He dryly quipped, “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse” (I Love You, Madame Librarian, 2004). Vonnegut’s characters often seem trapped in the machinery of inanity by powers or circumstances far beyond their control. His novel Timequake (1996) contains this existential gem: “All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.” This keen sense of absurdity and despair affected his literary endeavors. “Listen,” he states in Cold Turkey (2004), “all great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”
Perhaps Vonnegut’s despondency becomes more understandable when one considers the painful agonies he had suffered during young adulthood. On Mother’s Day, 1944, two years after he enlisted in the U.S. army, Vonnegut’s mom committed suicide. This tragedy would haunt Vonnegut for the rest of his life, and it caused him to ponder the subject of suicide immoderately. Nevertheless, in spite of this personal calamity, Vonnegut resolutely continued with his military career, and the young soldier was duly sent off to the European Theater.
Vonnegut was just one of seven American prisoners of war to survive the Allied saturation bombing of the German city of Dresden in February of 1945. “Utter destruction,” he would later recall. “Carnage unfathomable.” Vonnegut and the other prisoners were forced to dig out charred bodies from the city rubble. “Over one hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground,” he later related to an interviewer. “It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.” This Dresden experience would become the basis for Vonnegut’s most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, a work he described as “short and jumbled and jangled,” since “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” When the novel appeared in 1969, Vonnegut became a literary hero and a subversive voice within the American counter-culture of the late sixties and early seventies. Its graphic description of the horrors of armed conflict resonated with many anti-war members of the Vietnam generation.
These events left Vonnegut cynical and hardened. “Let us be perfectly frank for a change,” he later wrote. “For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough” (Timequake 1996). But can this truly be the “conclusion of the whole matter”? Is there no ground for meaning in this life, nor a foundation for life beyond the grave? Vonnegut never discovered such a golden treasure of hope. I am reminded of an analogy embedded in the chronology of his last days. Vonnegut passed away on April 11, due to a brain injury suffered several weeks prior. He spent the interim period in an impaired state, and thus both Good Friday and Easter opaquely passed by without his conscious awareness. Although Vonnegut considered religious belief to be naively simplistic and even dangerous, on April 8 pulpits throughout the land faithfully proclaimed that the bright rays of resurrection morning could dispel the darkened nights of human hearts.
Vonnegut’s temporary yet final inability to experience Resurrection Sunday (and its vindication of the redemptive sacrifice of Good Friday) may serve as an analogical representation of the entirety of his irreligious life. Vonnegut spent his earthly days “having no hope, and without God in the world.” In the opening sentence of Fates Worse than Death (1991), Vonnegut explains that the essay collection was published as a sequel to his Palm Sunday (1980). Yet sadly, the biblical and traditional sequel to Palm Sunday celebrated by Christian believers worldwide never dawned for Vonnegut. His life was permanently stamped by the cruel events of February 1945, but never by the renewing power of Easter Sunday morning. The warm spring breezes of abundant life and Christian hope never melted away Vonnegut’s winter of postmodern despair.
May Vonnegut’s life and death remind us that the divine proclamation to fallen humanity in all its sinful depravity remains the unchanging Gospel which we have received, which we preach, and wherein we stand (1 Cor. 15:1). Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures. And this kerygma of the cross and the empty tomb brings living hope in its wake: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead” (1 Cor 15:19). Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
